I freed a thousand slaves I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves. -Harriet Tubman

In 1968, government transfer payments totaled $53 billion or roughly 7% of personal income. By 2014, these had climbed to $2.5 trillion—about 17% of personal income. Despite the redistribution of a sixth of all income, inequality measured by all three of the Census Bureau’s indexes is far higher today than in 1968. -Lawrence Lindsey

“This is painful for a liberal to admit,” writes liberal New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, “but conservatives have a point when they suggest that America’s safety net can sometimes entangle people in soul-crushing dependency.” -Michael Barone

City officials have suspended operations of the Safe Streets anti-violence program in East Baltimore after police officers found seven guns and drugs stashed inside the Monument Street office. Police said a robbery investigation led them to the office, and two employees were among those arrested. The suspension sidelines the program's work in East Baltimore at a time when gun violence has been spiking.

Safe Streets, a grant-funded program under the city's Health Department, uses ex-felons in an effort to stem crime. The program has been lauded for keeping violence at a minimum in the four neighborhoods where it operates, and some officials have urged its replication across the city.

In the town that launched the War on Poverty 48 years ago, the poor are getting poorer despite the government's help. And the rich are getting richer because of it. The top 5 percent of households in Washington, D.C., made more than $500,000 on average last year, while the bottom 20 percent earned less than $9,500 - a ratio of 54 to 1. That gap is up from 39 to 1 two decades ago. It's wider than in any of the 50 states and all but two major cities. This at a time when income inequality in the United States as a whole has risen to levels last seen in the years before the Great Depression.

Based on data from the Congressional Research Service, cumulative spending on means-tested federal welfare programs, if converted into cash, would equal $167.65 per day per household living below the poverty level," writes the minority side of the Senate Budget Committee. "By comparison, the median household income in 2011 of $50,054 equals $137.13 per day. Additionally, spending on federal welfare benefits, if converted into cash payments, equals enough to provide $30.60 per hour, 40 hours per week, to each household living below poverty. The median household hourly wage is $25.03.

Charitable organizations and human rights activists in Houston hope to put an initiative on the November ballot that would reverse a controversial new ordinance which makes it a crime to feed the homeless, or otherwise give food away, without special permission.

The strategy essentially boils down to : You’re inferior. We know what is good for you. Trust us, we (the government) will look after you. Oddly enough every good communist or socialist I ever met (and yes, I have met some earnest good people believing in these philosophies), wanted to _help_ people, but assumed they’d be ones deciding what was good for those (inferior) people. -Dave Freer

A Seattle woman who is receiving welfare assistance from Washington state also happens to live in a waterfront house on Lake Washington worth more than a million dollars. Federal agents raided the home this weekend but have not released the woman or her husband's name because they have not officially been charged with a crime. However, federal documents obtained by KING 5 News show the couple currently receives more than $1,200 a month in public housing vouchers, plus state and government disability checks and food stamps. They have been receiving the benefits since 2003.

A Detroit nonprofit that received a no-bid, $1.2-million contract from the city to provide services to low-income people misspent $200,000 on furniture that ended up in city offices, the Free Press has learned.

Data released by the Census Bureau today showed the proportion of people living in poverty climbed to 15.1 percent last year from 14.3 percent in 2009, and median household income declined 2.3 percent. The number of Americans living in poverty was the highest in the 52 years since the U.S. Census Bureau began gathering that statistic. Those figures may have worsened in recent months as the economy weakened.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 49% of American Adults now think government programs increase the level of poverty in the United States, while just 20% say they decrease the problem.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 49% of American Adults now think government programs increase the level of poverty in the United States, while just 20% say they decrease the problem.

The problems are widespread, from an executive in New Orleans convicted of embezzling more than $900,000 in housing money around the time he bought a lavish Florida mansion to federal funds wrongly being spent to provide housing for sex offenders or to pay vouchers to residents long since dead.

A federal program designed to help impoverished families heat and cool their homes wasted more than $100 million paying the electric bills of thousands of applicants who were dead, in prison or living in million-dollar mansions, according to a government investigation.

80 percent believe the government does an ineffective job helping poor and middle-class Americans, but there is disagreement over whether government is pursuing the “wrong” policies (37 percent) or is pursuing the “right” ones ineffectively (43 percent).

Even as the economy has recovered, social welfare benefits make up 35 percent of wages and salaries this year, up from 21 percent in 2000 and 10 percent in 1960, according to TrimTabs Investment Research using Bureau of Economic Analysis data.

In 1949, President Harry Truman signed the Housing Act, which gave federal, state, and local governments unprecedented power to shape residential life.

One of the Housing Act's main initiatives - "urban renewal" - destroyed about 2,000 communities in the 1950s and '60s and forced more than 300,000 families from their homes.

Overall, about half of urban renewal's victims were black, a reality that led to James Baldwin's famous quip that "urban renewal means Negro removal."